Feeling Like a Child: Dreams and Practices of Sexuality in the West German Alternative Left during the Long 1970s

The 1960s and 1970s are popularly known as a “time of sexual challenge to the prudery, hypocrisy and stolid family conservatism dominating the post-war Fifties’ world.”¹ Scholars have often depicted these years as an era of sexual liberalization or even, especially in the context of the student revolts around 1968, as a time of sexual revolution.² In West Germany, the focus of this article, premarital sexual relations became a new norm, as a 1971 study by the Hamburg sexologists Hans Giese and Volkmar Sigusch noted.³ Behavior surveys of this period found that the number of male students between the age of twenty and twenty-two without coital experience decreased from 49 percent in 1966 to 28 percent in 1981; among female students, the change was even more dramatic, as the numbers fell from 54 percent to 18 percent.⁴ The introduction of the pill in 1961 untied heterosexual sexuality and reproduction to a hitherto unknown degree. Though this did not cause a sexual revolution, it made talking about both sexual pleasures and contraception easier.⁵ More generally, sexuality became more visible in the public sphere, not least through an increase in the availability of pornography.⁶ At the same time, people were encouraged to talk openly about their sexuality and sexual problems in therapeutic contexts.⁷

Attitudes toward children’s sexuality changed as well, as liberal and left-wing educators challenged the conviction that children are asexual. For example, Lilly Schuh-Gadmann, pedagogue and psychologist at the University of Zurich, argued in the German weekly magazine Der Spiegel that “the pre-school child has the same sexuality as an adult human being,” and even the youngest children have “sexual impulses” that society simply dismissed.⁸ In 1970 members of the German parliament charged with reforming criminal law even listened to radical education scholar Helmut Kentler, sexologist Volkmar Sigusch, and other sociologists and psychologists, who declared that children would not suffer from sexual relations with adults and that those relations should not be punished, because they are a “crime without a victim.”⁹

While such calls for legalizing sexual relations between children and adults were not successful, other legal norms changed. The prosecution of adult male homosexual acts ended in September 1969, with the age of consent set at twenty-one. Although this was lowered to eighteen in 1973, it was still much higher than for heterosexual relations, where the age of consent was fourteen.¹⁰ Three years later, after massive protests by the women’s movement, abortion laws were reformed, and abortions within the first twelve weeks became legal under specific conditions.¹¹ All these developments contributed, scholars have claimed, to a liberalization of social attitudes and legal norms concerning sexuality during the 1960s and 1970s.¹²

The narrative of a successful sexual liberalization in postwar Europe, however, has recently been challenged. Dagmar Herzog has argued that there were “moments of renewed sexual conservatism” during this era that represent backlashes “against the sexual revolution.” As an alternative to the “liberalization paradigm,” she has called historians’ attention to the “syncopated quality of sexual developments in Western Europe,” by which she means that we need to pay attention to the ambivalences of the process—its “tangled texture of emotions”—and its variety of expression in different national contexts.¹³ Although her critique is convincing, the narrative she offers instead remains embedded within what one might call the liberalization framework.¹⁴ The question is still whether there was more or less liberalization and how conservative setbacks could undo steps toward a liberalized sexuality. Informed by Michel Foucault, scholars such as Andrea Bührmann, Andrea Trumann, and Sven Reichardt have offered a more radical critique of this liberalization story. They emphasize that the allegedly liberated sexuality that developed within the context of the women’s movement and the broader alternative Left entailed its own set of internalized rules and norms, which required men and women both to constantly talk about their sexual desires and to question the...